All They Will Call You

Tim Z. Hernandez occasionally refers to the agricultural workers as campesinos, meaning “farmer” in Spanish. This term is used both for those who remain in their home farms in Mexico and those who come to the US as temporary workers to pick crops. The term campesino serves to underscore the community and solidarity that exists between members of this class of Spanish-speaking agricultural workers. For example, after the plane crash, Hernandez notes that “campesinos would catch wind of it and spread the news around the labor camps” (178). This community of campesinos then turns out in the hundreds to attend the funeral, even though they did not personally know those who died in the flight.

Enganchado is a Spanish word that literally means “hooked.” It is used to describe Mexicans who go to the US to work as temporary agricultural workers, either as part of the official Bracero Program or in an unofficial capacity. The term refers to those who are “hooked” or unwilling to give up the migrations from Mexico to the US for work. It can be hard to give up the work for those from very poor, rural towns because they can make money in a short period of time in the US, which they can use to support their families. Hernandez describes Guadalupe as preferring the term enganchado to bracero because bracero sounds like a description of someone as a body part whereas enganchado “suggests that the allure of earning little money, enduring physical labor, not to mention a constant longing for home, is something one comes to rely on, like an addiction” (76).

La Huesera is a Mexican folkloric figure whose name translates to the Bone Woman. In Hernandez’s fictionalized account of the inmates from the labor camp who comb the valley looking for pieces of the body, one of the inmates, “El Indio,” describes La Huesera: “When she finds the bones, she puts the animal, or person, back together” (18). El Indio compares El Huesera to the crash investigators attempting to identify the body parts of the people who were killed in the plane crash. This metaphor is later revisited in the Epigraph to Part 5: Field Notes (2012-2015) where Hernandez quotes poet Irene Lara Silva’s poem “La Huesera,” implying that Hernandez sees himself as one of the crash investigators attempting to put people back together again from small fragments of their metaphorical bones.

La migra is the American Spanish slang term for immigration services. It is short for la inmigración, or immigration. La migra can refer to any of the US immigration departments, including Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and border patrol. As described by Hernandez, Mexican immigrants to the US, especially given the constraints and demands of the Bracero program, have an expectation that they will eventually be caught and deported by la migra. Those who cross frequently without a visa or authorization, like Luis, learn how to evade la migra. In All They Will Call You: The Telling of the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos Canyon, it is the decision of la migra to put the workers on an overloaded and under-maintenance airplane that leads to their deaths. Despite the official denial of culpability, la migra paid out restitution to the families of some of the victims.